Spiritual Practices
Meaning

Quotes

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
— Karen Armstrong in Visions of God

Death of ritual might also be the death of delight — or rather the loss of form and courtesy as entry ways to learning and participation.
— Catherine Bateson in Peripheral Visions

Existence will remain meaningless for you if you yourself do not penetrate into it with active love, and if you do not in this way discover its meaning for yourself. Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you.
— Martin Buber quoted in Reel Power by Marsha Sinetar

What we are looking for on earth and in earth and in our lives is the process that can unlock for us the mystery of meaningfulness in our daily lives. It has been the best-kept secret down through the ages because it is so simple. Truly, the last place it would ever occur to most of us to find the sacred would be in the commonplace of our everyday lives and all about us in nature and in simple things.
— Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone

Meaning does not come to us in finished form, ready-made; it must be found, created, received, constructed. We grow our way toward it.
— Ann Bedford Ulanov quoted in Dear Heart, Come Home by Joyce Rupp

Our quiet daily life is full of meaning and mystery. It is like a continuation of the hidden years spent by Jesus in Nazareth.
— Ernesto Cardenal in Abide in Love

We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.
— Jacob Needleman in A Little Book on Love

We must remind ourselves that, though our lives are small and our acts seem insignificant, we are generative elements of this universe, and we create meaning with each act that we perform or fail to perform.
— Kent Nerburn in Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

Insights from myth, dreams, and intuitions, from glimpses of an invisible reality, and from perennial human wisdom provide us with hints and guesses about the meaning of life and what we are here for. Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action are the means through which we grow and find meaning.
— Jean Shinoda Bolen in Close to the Bone

The work of religion is to open our eyes to see a world where everything swirls with meaning.
— Richard Rohr in Quest for the Grail